Posted at 14:40 GMT on Monday 3rd April 2006

Round 17 will be a paid round. Unlike previous rounds, if you upgrade before ticks start, then you get 5000 of each resource as before. However, if you upgrade late, you will now receive 5000+ $tick*100 of each resource. This will make it slightly more worthwhile to upgrade later in the round. Late signups will also receive slightly more resources than before.

Round 17 stats are (about) finalised, having been mainly supervised by Gate. They are currently viewable at http://www.planetarion.com/manual/stats/beta. Pending large holes being found in them, they won't be changed more than a few possible tweaks. We'll announce if they are changed.

Buddy Packs, Exile and Auto Exile.
Buddy packs will be a maximum 5 as in the previous round, and galaxies will consist of up to 5 buddy packed people (1x5, 1x4, 1x3+1x2, 2x2).

Exile and auto exile have been changed. Self exile and galaxy exile are now re-enabled for those in buddy packs.

Auto exile can now be enabled or disabled on the "politics" screen by ministers. If you want to keep someone who is inactive in your galaxy, set them to "wanted". Otherwise, set "unwanted". All planets are "wanted" by default.

For those planets who are "unwanted", free planets will be auto exiled after 3 days of inactivity. Paid planets are auto exiled after 14 days of inactivity.

Score and eXPerience
The score formula has changed. It is now score = value + xp*50.

XP has changed in a few ways:
XP is now shown along with the amount of resources.

You now get more xp for scanning. For any scan you get: int(2*scan_id / (1+# of previous scans in the last 24 hours)) xp (where scan_id = 1 for planet scan, 2 for surface scan, etc).

When sending (fake) defence to a planet who has an incoming hostile fleet landing the same tick, you get 5 XP/tick, or 7 XP/tick if the planet is in your galaxy. If you land and combat occurs, you get 100 XP divided between all defending fleets (including those of the target planet) by value.

When stealing asteroids in combat, XP is now (probably) the following:

The alliance limit will be as follows:
Until tick 120 (5 days into the round), the maximum limit will be 60 planets.

After tick 120, those alliances not in the top 5 with 60 planets will be able to accept up to another 20 planets (80 planets total) at a rate of one a minimum of every max(1,14-$rank) ticks.

HOWEVER, only the top 70 planets of the alliance (by score) will count towards alliance ranking.
[modified]

Other changes for next round include:
Fake defence has been added. It recalls 1 tick before combat occurs (i.e. when it's on ETA 2 and ticks, it goes home instead of changing to ETA 1).

Changing the logging of galaxy fund actions from the MoD's news to a page linked to on the Politics page.

Allowing Alliance HCs to see actions within the alliance via a link on the Alliance page. This includes creating the alliance, applying for the alliance, joining the alliance, leaving the alliance, being kicked from the alliance, having the status changed in the alliance, and sending and deleting mails via the alliance messages page. The HC doing the action is logged as well as the user, and if no HC is relevant the HC is logged as the user. The tick and precise time are also logged.

We now have an alliance fund. This works in precisely the same way as the galaxy fund (including the new logging method).

However, donations are delayed by 8 ticks from the alliance fund to the planet and cannot be canceled once donated. The planet being donated to cannot be above the alliance average value OR alliance average score, and can only receive a maximum of int((1 +($tick -72)/13) * 100000) resources total - 100k in tick 72, and ~ 10 million by the end of the round.

Overview has been changed so that incoming fleets (not your own fleets!) are in the same format as galaxy status, to make it easier when reporting incomings.

We've also improved some of the admin tools, so server access is not so essential for many of the support requests we usually have.

We hope you enjoy the latest round of Planetarion - remember, ticks start on Friday, April 14th at 21:00 GMT.
The PA Team